The constitution says the president must take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

David Mamet says our president is a tyrant. Our president says he’s a pragmatist. He also says we are a nation of laws and that he doesn’t have the power to issue executive orders ending deportations.

Except that he did issue an executive order limiting deportations after the Senate voted down the Dream Act. And he just overturned parts of his own health care law by unilaterally issuing waivers to cronies, suspending the employer mandate, and telling insurance companies to stop canceling policies that ObamaCare requires them to cancel.

Other than that he’s a helpless pragmatic bunny.

Nation of Laws

Kevin D. Williamson, in National Review, agrees that Obama is a pragmatist – a lawless pragmatist. He says Obama believes in committees of experts rather than the constitution:

Harry Reid has just helped take the brakes off of President Obama’s lawless agenda, for the purpose of installing friendly judges who will look the other way when his agenda is put to the legal test.

President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party.

I missed posting this one while on the USO trip. It’s from the big UN confab in New York last month.

Iran has a new president with a nice smile. President Obama put out the word he’d be happy to shake hands with President Rouhani but Rouhani snubbed him. It kind of reminded me of Ted Kennedy’s snub of President Carter at the 1980 Dem convention.

Rouhani Takes Call From Great Satan

The Iranian leader later accepted a phone call from President Obama. Wonder how that went… “Mr. President, please hold for President Obama?” ..or “The President is with a client state right now, please hold.

Putin wrote an op-ed in the NYT last week mocking Obama and the idea of American Exceptionalism. He scored bonus points because everyone knows Obama himself is not so wild about the idea. He thinks America is exceptional in the same way Britain and Greece are exceptional. Which is to say, not very. But that didn’t stop him last week from asking Americans to support an attack on Syrian president Assad – with something more than a pinprick, yet unbelievably small – because we are exceptional.

The abuse continued this week when a Russian minister claimed the Navy Ship Yard shooting was an example of American Exceptionalism.

Exceptional and Weird

Maureen Dowd had a few thoughts of her own about the president concerning the partisan speech he delivered while the shooting was still going on:

“The man who connected so electrically and facilely in 2008, causing Americans to overlook his thin résumé, cannot seem to connect anymore… Top Democrats who used to consider Obama one cool cat now muse that he’s “one weird cat,” as one big shot put it.”